Darren Jorgensen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3637553 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Darren Jorgensen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Darren |
| FAMILY NAME | Jorgensen |
| SIGNATURE | JORGENSEN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Western Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4313-2110 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The art history and contemporaneity of Terry Smith
This essay surveys 50 years of essays and books by art historian Terry Smith, arguing that his encounters with conceptual art and Australian Aboriginal art inform a concept of contemporaneity that has emerged in his writing in the twenty-first century as a description of the historical zeitgeist. The rise of contemporary art since the 1990s enables a thinking about a state of contemporaneity that describes a coevality of difference across geograp…
UnAustralian Art ButlerRexDonaldsonAdsunAustralian Art
The illustrated literature of Solomon Cocky
In 1946, hundreds of Aboriginal workers left their place as indentured labourers on pastoral stations in the North-West of Australia. They went on to organise their own artisanal mines and buy their own pastoral stations, organising themselves collectively against the Australian government and the interests of local pastoralists. Some 30 years later, the ‘Strike Mob’ as they are remembered, established a school with its own publishing programme, …
Tracker Nat Warano’s art of ngijinkirri , the Tennant Creek Brio and Warumungu history
During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s the Warumungu carver Nat Warano, better known as Tracker Nat, produced drawings and painted carvings as gifts and for exchange in the town of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. His art practice was a part of his role as a leader of the Warumungu community, as he played a role in moving the community from a reserve outside the township to Warrabri to the south. His gifting of carvings was part of a history a…
James Wigley and the Strelley Mob
James Wigley has been historicised by Australian art scholars as a social realist, but the focus of his work through the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s differed from others who were a part of this art movement. During this time, he returned again and again to join the “strike mob” who had walked off pastoral stations in the Pilbara in 1946 and become independent by mining and purchasing their own pastoral properties. The organiser of the strikers, D…
Slow Time
Nyaparu (William) Gardiner’s drawings and paintings bring a lived perspective to histories of the 1946 pastoral workers’ strike in the Pilbara in Western Australia. This strike has been documented largely through the dramatic events of 1946 and through the subsequent struggles of strike leaders, including Clancy McKenna and Don McLeod, with the state government. Gardiner was born into the strike, and worked on its mining and pastoral settlements …
Big John Dodo and Karajarri histories
John Dodo (c. 1910-2003) is known in the Australian artworld for making enigmatic sculptures of men's heads, often wearing ceremonial headbands. This essay draws on new information about Dodo from an archival interview and from the memories of his widow Aunty Rosie Munroe, as well as his
Flags and landscapes
In 1993, eighty-five paintings from the Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie, executed with cheap paints on cardboard and canvas board, were exhibited in San Diego by the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronteriza (BAW/TAF). By the 1990s, the BAW/TAF was well known for making border art, a term that described art about living on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States. This exhibition of art by the so-called ‘fringe dwellers’ of Austra…
Liveness and improficiency in The Clean’s influence upon Dunedin Sound bands
The Clean are a key band in the history of the ‘Dunedin Sound’ of Flying Nun artists from the 1980s. The nature of their influence is however contested by both Dunedin Sound musicians and scholars. This article argues that The Clean’s significance lay in their simulation of improficiency in live performances and recordings. This improficiency is a form of what Philip Auslander calls ‘liveness’, as it represents an attempt to produce authenticity …
The art of Station Time
From the 1800s to the 1970s, Australian Aboriginal people were employed to work on cattle and sheep stations across the north of the country. While historians argue over whether the relationship of these labourers was a form of indenture or slavery, artists testify to the various experiences of this long period of Australian history. Ceremonial life adapted to the arrival of new animals and stations with new song-cycles that incorporated the danc…
Remote Avant-Garde
Improvised Rock and Independent Labels: The Dead C, Dunedin and the 1990s 1
Ten Canoes as a communist film
This essay thinks through the populist Marxism of Bertolt Brecht, and more specifically his courtroom challenge to the film industry, in order to interpret the Australian film Ten Canoes as a communist film. The idea of communism has recently been proposed by French philosopher Alain Badiou as a way of naming projects that are not only anti-capitalist, but that also suggest alternative modes of organisation. Ten Canoes actualises Brecht's ideas a…
Demand the Impossible
An expanded new edition of Tom Moylan's Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination includes a heated if polite debate over the “critical utopia.” This takes place in a new introduction and additional chapter to the book, as well as in a series of reflections on Demand written by some of the more influential scholars in the field. The new introduction reminds us of the political context of the critical utopia, this being th…
Uses of the dialectical image
Contemporary interpretations of Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image tend to substitute object images, such as photographs, for subjective ones. In his own time, Benjamin's contemporaries Theodor Adorno and Andre Breton were suspicious of the role that objective images played in commodity capitalism. Adorno's Frankfurt School Marxism and Breton's Marxist surrealism illustrate the way that subjective images can be mobilized to think …
Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, jilamara, and art history on the Tiwi Islands
Ethnography is the principal method for studying the art of the Tiwi Islands, as it is for the study of Aboriginal Australian art more generally. Relying on the testimonies of the artists themselves, scholars use Tiwi art to build knowledge of Tiwi cosmologies and society. This essay turns to the oeuvre of Tiwi artist Jean Baptiste Apuatimi to argue that the methodology of visual analysis can also contribute to knowledge of Tiwi cosmology and soc…
Aboriginality, hyper-visibility and wobbliness in paintings from Australia's Western Desert
In the Gibson desert of Australia, elderly Aboriginal people took up painting as recently as the twenty-first century. Many grew up in the bush, as hunter-gatherers, and have lived much of their lives in remote Aboriginal communities. Their decision to become artists, and the kinds of paintings that they make, reflect their place in the history of Aboriginal Australian art, as well as the changes that global capital is bringing to remote Australi…
Dreams and Magic in Surrealism and Aboriginal Australian Art
This article points to the confluence of dreams and magic in the discourses adopted by two very different art movements that emerged during the twentieth century. The first is French Surrealism, which adopted dreams and magic as a way of translating esoteric ideas to a global spectatorship. The second is the Australian Aboriginal art movement, which continues to use these ideas as ways of explaining cosmologies that remain alien to colonial Austr…
Middle America, the Moon, the Sublime and the Uncanny
On the utopianism of painting from remote communities1
Some of the first Europeans in Australia speculated that the centre of the continent hid an inland sea surrounded by well-watered plains. In the late twentieth century, this utopian imagination transferred from an imagination of water to one associated with Indigenous Australians. In an era of global cultural traffic, the painting movement from remote Australia constitutes a utopian communication that wants to bring about better relations between…
On Cross-Cultural Interpretations of Aboriginal Art
This paper critiques three schools of international art scholarship and their relevance to Australian Aboriginal art from remote communities. These schools are primitivism, histories of ornament and aesthetic theory. This is with a view to looking beyond accounts of Aboriginal art as representational, and toward a cross-cultural and sensual account of its practice. While primitivism influenced the scholarship on high art, histories of ornament an…
On the realism of Aboriginal art
Urban Aboriginal Art is a self-reflexive picturing of racial construction critiques the commodification of Aboriginality. The realism of Aboriginal art lies in its non-Aboriginality, its denaturalisation from constructions of race
Australia
Australia
Australia
The art of Station Time
From the 1800s to the 1970s, Australian Aboriginal people were employed to work on cattle and sheep stations across the north of the country. While historians argue over whether the relationship of these labourers was a form of indenture or slavery, artists testify to the various experiences of this long period of Australian history. Ceremonial life adapted to the arrival of new animals and stations with new song-cycles that incorporated the danc…
Demand the Impossible
An expanded new edition of Tom Moylan's Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination includes a heated if polite debate over the “critical utopia.” This takes place in a new introduction and additional chapter to the book, as well as in a series of reflections on Demand written by some of the more influential scholars in the field. The new introduction reminds us of the political context of the critical utopia, this being th…
Aboriginality, hyper-visibility and wobbliness in paintings from Australia's Western Desert
In the Gibson desert of Australia, elderly Aboriginal people took up painting as recently as the twenty-first century. Many grew up in the bush, as hunter-gatherers, and have lived much of their lives in remote Aboriginal communities. Their decision to become artists, and the kinds of paintings that they make, reflect their place in the history of Aboriginal Australian art, as well as the changes that global capital is bringing to remote Australi…
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
On the realism of Aboriginal art
Urban Aboriginal Art is a self-reflexive picturing of racial construction critiques the commodification of Aboriginality. The realism of Aboriginal art lies in its non-Aboriginality, its denaturalisation from constructions of race
On the utopianism of painting from remote communities1
Some of the first Europeans in Australia speculated that the centre of the continent hid an inland sea surrounded by well-watered plains. In the late twentieth century, this utopian imagination transferred from an imagination of water to one associated with Indigenous Australians. In an era of global cultural traffic, the painting movement from remote Australia constitutes a utopian communication that wants to bring about better relations between…
On Cross-Cultural Interpretations of Aboriginal Art
This paper critiques three schools of international art scholarship and their relevance to Australian Aboriginal art from remote communities. These schools are primitivism, histories of ornament and aesthetic theory. This is with a view to looking beyond accounts of Aboriginal art as representational, and toward a cross-cultural and sensual account of its practice. While primitivism influenced the scholarship on high art, histories of ornament an…
Middle America, the Moon, the Sublime and the Uncanny
Aboriginality, hyper-visibility and wobbliness in paintings from Australia's Western Desert
In the Gibson desert of Australia, elderly Aboriginal people took up painting as recently as the twenty-first century. Many grew up in the bush, as hunter-gatherers, and have lived much of their lives in remote Aboriginal communities. Their decision to become artists, and the kinds of paintings that they make, reflect their place in the history of Aboriginal Australian art, as well as the changes that global capital is bringing to remote Australi…
Dreams and Magic in Surrealism and Aboriginal Australian Art
This article points to the confluence of dreams and magic in the discourses adopted by two very different art movements that emerged during the twentieth century. The first is French Surrealism, which adopted dreams and magic as a way of translating esoteric ideas to a global spectatorship. The second is the Australian Aboriginal art movement, which continues to use these ideas as ways of explaining cosmologies that remain alien to colonial Austr…
Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, jilamara, and art history on the Tiwi Islands
Ethnography is the principal method for studying the art of the Tiwi Islands, as it is for the study of Aboriginal Australian art more generally. Relying on the testimonies of the artists themselves, scholars use Tiwi art to build knowledge of Tiwi cosmologies and society. This essay turns to the oeuvre of Tiwi artist Jean Baptiste Apuatimi to argue that the methodology of visual analysis can also contribute to knowledge of Tiwi cosmology and soc…
Uses of the dialectical image
Contemporary interpretations of Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image tend to substitute object images, such as photographs, for subjective ones. In his own time, Benjamin's contemporaries Theodor Adorno and Andre Breton were suspicious of the role that objective images played in commodity capitalism. Adorno's Frankfurt School Marxism and Breton's Marxist surrealism illustrate the way that subjective images can be mobilized to think …
Demand the Impossible
An expanded new edition of Tom Moylan's Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination includes a heated if polite debate over the “critical utopia.” This takes place in a new introduction and additional chapter to the book, as well as in a series of reflections on Demand written by some of the more influential scholars in the field. The new introduction reminds us of the political context of the critical utopia, this being th…
Improvised Rock and Independent Labels: The Dead C, Dunedin and the 1990s 1
Ten Canoes as a communist film
This essay thinks through the populist Marxism of Bertolt Brecht, and more specifically his courtroom challenge to the film industry, in order to interpret the Australian film Ten Canoes as a communist film. The idea of communism has recently been proposed by French philosopher Alain Badiou as a way of naming projects that are not only anti-capitalist, but that also suggest alternative modes of organisation. Ten Canoes actualises Brecht's ideas a…
Liveness and improficiency in The Clean’s influence upon Dunedin Sound bands
The Clean are a key band in the history of the ‘Dunedin Sound’ of Flying Nun artists from the 1980s. The nature of their influence is however contested by both Dunedin Sound musicians and scholars. This article argues that The Clean’s significance lay in their simulation of improficiency in live performances and recordings. This improficiency is a form of what Philip Auslander calls ‘liveness’, as it represents an attempt to produce authenticity …
The art of Station Time
From the 1800s to the 1970s, Australian Aboriginal people were employed to work on cattle and sheep stations across the north of the country. While historians argue over whether the relationship of these labourers was a form of indenture or slavery, artists testify to the various experiences of this long period of Australian history. Ceremonial life adapted to the arrival of new animals and stations with new song-cycles that incorporated the danc…
Remote Avant-Garde
Flags and landscapes
In 1993, eighty-five paintings from the Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie, executed with cheap paints on cardboard and canvas board, were exhibited in San Diego by the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronteriza (BAW/TAF). By the 1990s, the BAW/TAF was well known for making border art, a term that described art about living on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States. This exhibition of art by the so-called ‘fringe dwellers’ of Austra…
Slow Time
Nyaparu (William) Gardiner’s drawings and paintings bring a lived perspective to histories of the 1946 pastoral workers’ strike in the Pilbara in Western Australia. This strike has been documented largely through the dramatic events of 1946 and through the subsequent struggles of strike leaders, including Clancy McKenna and Don McLeod, with the state government. Gardiner was born into the strike, and worked on its mining and pastoral settlements …
Big John Dodo and Karajarri histories
John Dodo (c. 1910-2003) is known in the Australian artworld for making enigmatic sculptures of men's heads, often wearing ceremonial headbands. This essay draws on new information about Dodo from an archival interview and from the memories of his widow Aunty Rosie Munroe, as well as his
The illustrated literature of Solomon Cocky
In 1946, hundreds of Aboriginal workers left their place as indentured labourers on pastoral stations in the North-West of Australia. They went on to organise their own artisanal mines and buy their own pastoral stations, organising themselves collectively against the Australian government and the interests of local pastoralists. Some 30 years later, the ‘Strike Mob’ as they are remembered, established a school with its own publishing programme, …
History (21 works) · History (18 works) · Art (15 works) · Art history (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Visual arts (8 works)